George Eliot and The Book of William and Book Blog Holiday Swap

We woke up to six inches of powder this morning. Love winter. Love snow. Fell on ice in parking lot this afternoon. Still love winter, not so crazy about black ice.

To begin with the last item in the post title, I want to thank my lovely Secret Santa whose gift arrived today. I know this sounds so girly, but I did squeal and shout for family members to come and see the single best Secret Santa gift I have ever received...my very own Jane Austen action figure!



I have known about and lusted after these for years now, and my Austen shelf now boasts one. Thanks also for the terrific Literary Christmas card (the kids particularly liked "Eleven-Year-Old Wizards Flying" though my favorite is "Two Diverging Roads"). The crafty Christmasy bookmarks are also appreciated and will be treasured. What a great idea, this Book Blogger Holiday Swap! Thanks, Santa!

Now on to what I'm reading. I started two wonderful books this week, and anticipate reading them slowly.



The first will take the longest as it's Jenny Uglow's biography of George Eliot. It's a far smaller book than Uglow's bio of Gaskell, and hence not nearly as detailed, particularly in the part covering Eliot's first 25 or so years. According to the introduction, Uglow originally wrote the book in the 1980s and then revisited it in 2007. It may be small be it is still dense with insights that are beautifully expressed. Here is my favorite passage so far:

George Eliot's fictional world seems so weighty and ballasted by details of landscape, behavior, intricate social codes and practices but, like the stable Warwickshire community she grew up in, and like the carefully packed routine of her early life, it is a structure built on sand. What gives her fiction its eternal appeal is the balance of forces experienced by her heroes and heroines within the books, and by the author herself, who knows that the solidity of her meticulous realist novels, like the social systems they demonstrate, is mere illusion, created by the sorcery of words. p.40

I was astounded to learn that Maryann Evans (aka George Eliot) by age 25 had "a firm base for her evolving personal philosophy and a public reputation as the translator of Strauss's Das Leben Jesu, one of the most influential books of the century." I had to resort to Wikipedia to read up on David Strauss and his The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined. I also called my library and requested a copy via interlibrary loan. All along, I had assumed the first Eliot book I would read would be Scenes of Clerical Life, but I can't very well do a full read of Eliot without starting with her translation of Das Leben Jesu, can I?



The second of my new books is The Book of William: How Shakespeare's First Folio Conquered the World by Paul Collins. It's a joy to read, pure and simple. Instead of being divided into chapters, it's divided into Acts and Scenes, which is kind of cute.

Act I is about how the First Folio came into being--i.e., how fellow actors and colleagues of Shakespeare's, John Heminge and Henry Condell, rounded up the various plays they knew to be Shakespeare's and arranged to have them printed in a folio. Collins writes movingly about how this action on their part is really the only reason we know about Shakespeare, as many of the plays weren't wildy popular and had disappeared from the stage by the time Shakespeare died. In the course of describing the birth of the First Folio, Collins imparts tons of info about the 17th century publishing trade.

Fun Fact: the Great Fire of 1666, which diarist Samuel Pepys chronicles so well, not only destroyed many of the copies of the First Folio, it also almost entirely wiped out the country's booksellers and publishers. "The newly printed Third Folio fared worst of all; innumerable unsold copies went up in flames, ironically making the Third a rarer Folio today than even the First."

Fun Fact: the Second Folio, produced nine years after the First, corrected nearly seventeen hundred errors that were in the First, which comes out to about two per page...not bad, according to Collins.

I'm not planning on racing through this book, reading and savoring it is just too enjoyable.

Now it's time for me to try to squeeze in episode 12 of House of Elliot before the witching hour.

Potpourri

How did a week go by without a post? Oh, yeah, it was Thanksgiving week here in the U.S.

What have I been doing? Well, for starters, we invited my parents up for the holiday. They live about 100 miles south of us--just 1.5 hours or so if the traffic is light. They are 86 and 88 and since our house is full of stairs, we all decided that a Courtyard Marriott would be sleeping quarters for them. Between picking them up Wednesday, cooking a wonderful dinner Wednesday night, shuttling them back and forth between our house and the Marriott for much needed naps while they were visiting, cooking a fabulous Thanksgiving feast on Thursday, teaching my mom how to make coffee in the hotel room, teaching my mom how to deal with those new-fangled plastic key cards, watching several episodes of Animal Planet, catching up on all the family doings, taking them back home on Friday, I'm just glad we have leftovers to last for awhile!

On the reading front, I have started and given up on Bronteby Glyn Hughes. It was better than The Secret Diaries of Charlotte Bronte, but on the whole rather flat really little more than dramatizing well-worn tales from Bronte lore. I'm not quite sure what I expected but I found myself growing impatient and rolling my eyes, so I figured this book wasn't a good way to spend my precious reading time.

I've also been plowing my way through the Clare Fergusson/Russ Van Alstyne mystery series by Julia Spencer-Fleming. I reached book five, All Mortal Flesh yesterday and was shocked to find that the series had jumped the shark! ****SPOILERS**** skip to the next paragraph if you don't want to learn that Spencer-Fleming did a cardinal no-no in my opinion. She killed off Russ's wife, Linda. Maybe some day I will read the novel and find out why, but I was so ticked off that Spencer-Fleming betrayed my trust as a reader that I returned the book to the library and will Clare and Russ a rest for awhile. Maybe I was irked because book four, To Darkness and to Death, was so terrific--the whole novel took place in one day and it was really well-written and interesting in that the mystery wasn't figuring out which dastardly arch villain was orchestrating the mayhem but instead was a study in how ordinary people can find themselves going down very dark psychological alleys when pushed hard enough. I was thinking how marvelous Spencer-Fleming was developing as an author, and then she pulled that cheap trick in book five.

So, I started Paul Collins's The Book of William: How Shakespeare's First Folio Conquered the World. So far so good. Collins is an excellent writer--I've learned three new words and I've only read the first 50 pages--and the subject matter is compelling. Learning tons about the publishing industry in the early 1600s in London right now, and anticipating learning even more about Shakespeare, his colleagues, life in London, and how the First Folio conquered the world. BTW, I did finish A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare and need to find time to do my last blog on it...Hamlet. This was definitely my favorite book of 2009.

I also just started Jenny Uglow's bio of George Eliot. I enjoyed her bio of Gaskell so much that I have decided to read about Eliot while reading her works.

I did read another Henry James story--The Romance of Certain Old Clothes--and was again disappointed in James and the story. Nothing particularly wonderful in the way it was written, and the subject matter has been done to death. Sisters who are jealous rivals, and one haunts the other. Grim, misogynistic, uninspired. I am going to have to read Daisy Miller so I can give James his due.

Finally, I did read the first installment of The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins. I am on the email list for the installments, following the same publication schedule as the serialization of the novel 150 years ago. This is a reread for me, but I read the original so fast for plot years ago that I don't remember a lot of it.




On the adaptation front, I am on episode 11 of the first season of The House of Elliot. Evie and Bea are friends again, Jack is courting Bea, and Lydia is desperate to get back into London society. So much has happened in the first 10 episodes that it almost seems like several seasons worth of plot. I wonder whether this season was actually cancelled or if the producers simply ran out of steam after running so hard so fast. I'm still loving it, thinking about bobbing my hair, and dressing exclusively in 1920's fashions, including the hats! V. chic.

Woman in White - 150th Anniversary

I just signed up to receive email pdfs of Wilkie Collins' most famous novel, The Woman in White, following the same publication schedule as the novel received in Charles Dickens's periodical All The Year Round 150 years ago this Monday.

Visit WomaninWhite.co.uk for details on how you can sign up to get emails of weekly installments. A separate pdf will be published each week on the website as well, and the pdf is designed to capture the feel of the original.

I've been wanting to reread this book for awhile and this is the perfect way to do so--reading the installments on the same publication schedule as they originally had. What a cool idea!

As an aside, in looking for an appropriate image for this post, I found this painting shown above. It's called The Somnabulist, and it was painted in 1871 by Sir John Everett Millais, who might have been inspired by the immense popularity of The Woman in White. Here's a bit about the painting.

It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like...Giveaway Time

And the winners are...Maria Grazia and Laura Hartness. I'll be emailing you as well. Congratulations, ladies. Hope you enjoy the stories!


I have a few review copies of Intimations of Austen, my collection of Austen-inspired short stories, left from the last shipment and and I thought I would offer two up this week in a giveaway. You can consider it an early Christmas, Hanukkah, or Kwansaa present, or you can pass it along to a Janeite on your list.

This is especially designed for those of you who are getting a little bored (dare I say it) with Pride and Prejudice and want to venture into Mansfield Park, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion. Somehow I never wrote a short story around Sense and Sensibility or Emma--in the case of the latter, it might be because Queen Emma always insists on having full-length novels rather than short stories if she is to serve as inspiration. DISCLAIMER: I don't mean to imply that P&P doesn't get its due in Intimations...four of the nine stories are P&P-inspired, but that's less than 50%, for crying out loud!

If you would like to be entered in a drawing for one of two copies that I will draw for on Sunday, November 22:
1) Leave me a comment on this posting for one entry
2) Become a follower for two entries
3) Tweet about this giveaway for three entries
***Be sure to provide me with your email address so that I can let you know if/when you've won.

Not quite sure if this is your cup of tea?

Here are some reviews from fellow bloggers:
Laurel Ann from Austenprose
Heather at Gofita's Pages
Lisa at Lit and Life
From Alexa at First Impressions: A Tale of Less Pride & Prejudice
Mags on Austenblog

Top Ten Things to Know About Elizabeth Gaskell

When I heard that The Classics Circuit was sponsoring an Elizabeth Gaskell tour, there was no question that I would participate…but which work to write about? I wanted to do something fresh as I had already written about most of her works already. Since I think Elizabeth Gaskell is as interesting as any one of her works, here are the top ten things I think any reader should know about Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell to more fully appreciate her work.

1. First off, Gaskell was her married name. She was christened Elizabeth Cleghorn Stevenson. At 21, she married William Gaskell with whom she had four daughters, all of whom outlived her, and two sons, the first, Willie, died at age 4 and the other shortly after his birth. Her husband encouraged her to write her first novel, Mary Barton, as a way of working through and out of her grief over Willie's death. He had also encouraged her to write travel articles from the earliest days of their marriage, and throughout their years together he was unfailingly supportive of her work, giving her as much personal freedom as she needed to juggle the many activities and obligations she took on. She was known socially and professionally as Mrs. Gaskell, a label that has stuck, much to my irritation, almost to the present day with literary critics discussing Jane Austen, George Eliot, Charlotte Bronte, and Mrs. Gaskell. Let’s all band together and just call her Elizabeth Gaskell!

2. She was born to Unitarian parents in Chelsea (i.e., London) and married a Unitarian minister who had a parish in Manchester--she's a lot like her character, Margaret Hale from North and South in having connections to both the north and south of England. As a Unitarian, she was more educated than many other women of her time and class, and her daughters were also well-educated. Her favorite book was the third volume of Ruskin’s Modern Painters III--this is not easy reading and just reading about this book gave me new respect for Gaskell's intellect.

3. Gaskell was her 40-year-old mother's eighth child in 13 years, six of whom had died. A year after Elizabeth was born, her mother died and she was raised by her Aunt Lumb and a bevy of women in Knutsford (south of Manchester). Although her father remarried, she only occasionally visited him and his second family, which included her older brother, John, underscoring her own personal rejection by her father. The narrator of Cranford shares a similar history with Gaskell.

4. Her brother, John, with whom she shared a loving correspondence though not a lot of actual time together, went to sea when she was 12, and when she was 18 he was reported lost at sea. A lost brother is a recurring element in many of her stories, with North and South and Cranford being two of the most prominent.



5. Gaskell travelled extensively during her married life with long trips to Germany, France, Italy and throughout Britain, particularly Wales, and many of her works are set in places where she visited. She was fluent in French and German, and possibly Italian. The novella My Lady Ludlow contains several multi-page sections in French. I skipped those parts! The novella The Grey Woman is riddled with German and French phrases and is set in France and Germany. She spent several months in Whitby chatting up the locals to get stories that eventually coalesced into a unified whole in Sylvia’s Lovers. Uncharacteristically, Lois the Witch takes place primarily in America, which she never visited.

6. She was born in 1810 and died in 1865 at age 55. She died of a heart attack in a house she had recently purchased with the proceeds from her writing and that was to be a surprise gift to her hardworking husband, whom she hoped to induce into semi-retirement in the south of England. Her final work, Wives and Daughters, was near completion when she died, and her publisher did have notes from her outlining the resolution of the story.

7. Married to a Unitarian minister, Gaskell was extremely active and saw her work, especially in the early years, as her contribution to easing social injustice and helping those less fortunate. She wrote some of the earliest “problem novels” in England and helped to put a human face on the poor, the ill, and the oppressed. For this, many of her own class criticized her severely, which caused her a great deal of distress as she liked to be liked.

8. Gaskell was a very social person—I’ve called her an “Elizabeth Bennet.” She was charming, witty, intelligent, well-read, pretty, vivacious, and flirtatious. Good at dancing, telling stories, and entertaining, she often over-extended herself and usually had a houseful of guests, a full social calendar, was a Sunday School teacher and philanthropist, read the latest novels, political tracts, newspapers, and wrote long novels often under the arduous deadlines imposed by serialization. She regularly collapsed in exhaustion and took bed-rest vacations to recover her health and spirits, often with one or more of her children but usually without her husband, who also worked himself hard as a minister, teacher (of the mill workers in Manchester, in particular), and good-deed-doer. Hence, she revised her works very little once they were written, and often didn’t even reread them once they were published.

9. Cranford was her favorite of her works—it was nostalgic, comfortable, and uniformly praised. It began as stand-alone stories in magazines, and then she collected them into a novel while she was working on North and South, a work she came to dislike because of the incredible pressure she was under to finish it, only to have the wind knocked out of her when Dickens published his own Hard Times first. She also fought vigorously with Dickens over the title, various plot points, the ending, and the length. She was good friends with Dickens’ wife, Catherine, and when he left her for Ellen Ternan, she never forgave him.

10. She knew many luminaries of the nineteenth century and was beloved by many and caused incredible frustration to others.

She was a close friend and mentor of Charlotte Brontë, who was six years her junior but infinitely less worldly and far less confident socially. Gaskell visited Charlotte in Haworth and Charlotte visited Plymouth Grove, the Gaskell’s house in Manchester, three times. Gaskell counseled her and encouraged her as if she were her older sister, and Patrick Brontë requested that Gaskell write Charlotte’s biography after Charlotte died. She did so, and novelized it to the point where legal action was taken by several people mentioned in the book and she was forced to revise it.

She was fascinated by Florence Nightingale, whom she came to know through mutual friends, and after much soul-searching ultimately rejected Nightingale’s more strident love of humanity for her more gentle love of the individual. Here is a post that I did on this topic.

She argued and fought with Charles Dickens during their professional relationship—he famously said "If I were Mr. Gaskell, O heaven how I should beat her!" and she ultimately sought her husband’s help as peacemaker when it looked as if they might come to legal blows.

Gaskell and Charles Darwin were distantly related and they admired each other’s work—she modeled Roger Hamley of Wives and Daughters on Darwin.


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If you want to read more about Elizabeth Gaskell’s life and works, I can heartily recommend Jenny Uglow’s excellent biography, Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories. It’s long but worth every minute. She provides not only a readable narrative of Gaskell’s life, friends, interests, and travels, but she also provides excellent critical analyses of her works.

The Cambridge Companion to Elizabeth Gaskell (Cambridge Companions to Literature) is also good. I found it less dynamic than the The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen (Cambridge Companions to Literature), but I think Gaskell scholarship is quite a bit behind Austen scholarship and that is reflected in the two books.

The Gaskell Society is in the process of renovating Gaskell’s home in Manchester. They're also gearing up to celebrate the bicentennial of Gaskell's birth in 2010.

I have really enjoyed learning about Elizabeth Gaskell and diving into her works head first. She was a wonderful person, a gifted storyteller, a loving wife and parent, and, in many ways, a role model. Although she was a devout Christian who tried to help her fellow man through her writing and could have easily been ignored for her sentimentality and soapbox issues, her stories are masterfully created to present all sides of an argument and to respect the different points of view and the different circumstances that shaped her characters and their responses to life and to each other.

I spent last year reading the Uglow bio slowly while I read most of Gaskell’s works in the order they were written. If you scan my list of labels, you’ll find posts on all the novels and many of the stories and novellas. If you’re new to Gaskell, I recommend that you take a look at my post, Reading Gaskell for the First Time, in which I provide recommendations for the most enjoyable Gaskell works.

Enjoy the Gaskell tour, thanks for stopping by, and let me know what you think of this wonderful Victorian author.

Claire Ferguson and Russ Van Alstyne: my new obsession

A few weeks ago I was browsing the audio section of my library looking for something to listen to in the car since once again I am burned out on NPR and didn't yet have The List for musical diversion.

I remembered a mystery series that a fellow blogger had recommended (remind me who likes this series, because much as I've searched the blogs I frequent, I can't find out where I heard about it), and so got the first book in the Claire Ferguson/Russ Van Alstyne mysteries by Julia Spencer-Fleming, In the Bleak Midwinter (A Rev. Clare Fergusson and Russ Van Alstyne Mystery).

As a genre, I like mysteries from time to time, but do get burnt out on them as it's easy for them to get formulaic. The twist on this series is that Claire is an Anglican priest in a small town in upstate New York, and she is one tough, but attractive cookie, having been a helicopter pilot in the army during Desert Storm. She's single, driven, passionate, interesting, and compassionate. Russ is a good 15 years her senior, a VietNam vet turned chief of police. Married, driven, passionate, interesting, and compassionate. They hit it off. Sparks fly.

If I sound like I'm hooked, I am...but it took a little while to set the bait. First, the reader of the audio book was very irritating--I couldn't stand her Russ voice or her teen girl voice, and almost stopped listening because of that. Next, while I loved the premise of the story, I predicted almost each plot point at least a couple of pages before it was revealed, and I really hate feeling smug about being smarter than the author. Third, the characters had some verbal ticks that drove me up the wall (e.g., if Russ says "scuze my French" one more time after uttering the mildest of expletives, I think I may have to scream). Last, this book was published in 2003, when cell phones were not a novelty anymore but an appendage of everyone from kindergartners to grandmothers, and yet neither Russ nor Clare had one and relied on using landlines, when they could find them.

But, despite all this, their darned, doomed attraction for each other is so primal that I finished the audio book on the way to the library to pick up the second in the series, A Fountain Filled With Blood (A Rev. Clare Fergusson and Russ Van Alstyne Mystery), which I devoured this weekend. I'm heading up to the library tomorrow to pick up Out of the Deep I Cry (A Rev. Clare Fergusson and Russ Van Alstyne Mystery), third in the series. TBR list, you can wait, I need to find out if Russ leaves Linda for Claire, or if Claire starts to date in order to get over Russ, or if they can still be friends even though the whole town must be really talking about them by now.

I fully acknowledge that the series' angsty longing is driving my new obsession, I honestly think that the second novel is better than the first. The whodunit part was more masterly put together, and I loved the fact that the ending wasn't exactly tidy...a little like real life isn't exactly tidy with clean resolutions to thorny issues. And Russ is cutting down on the "Scuze my French"s and reading it is infinitely better than listening to a grating voice butcher a sensitive tough guy's voice. We're also seeing more of the town and its inhabitants, which increases overall credibility of the story and setting. And I know I'm going to like Russ's mom, Margy, who made a brief appearance in the second book, and who is another tough cookie with as much insight into the workings of the human heart as Claire.

The other thing I like about the series is that we aren't given the full backstory of the main characters right off the bat. I don't want to continue reading just to know whether Russ and Claire get together, but also to learn more about who they are and how they got to be who they are. I learned a little more about their histories in the second book, and I expect to be doled out a few more tantilizing tidbits in the third book.

I have to say, Julia Spencer-Fleming knows how to write a series, at least based on the first two books.

The Moonstone

I was inspired to select The Moonstone (Oxford World's Classics) from the tottering TBR pile so that I could get a more out of the Wilkie Collins tour sponsered by the Classics Circuit. It was a great choice--I'm glad I finally got around to reading it and can put a tick mark next to it on the list of classics read--but it wasn't necessarily a great book. A good book, yes, by all means, but not great.

More than anything else, The Moonstone is a mystery story. Told from the point-of-view of several characters, some quite minor to the plot actually, the narrative is a series of recollections that sometimes sound as if they were legal statements for a trial. While I can appreciate the air of authenticity this gives to the fiction, it does tend to get a bit tedious, especially if the characters are long-winded. I did think that Collins did a superb job in staying in character, with each of the narrators having their own distinct voice.

Also, considering that the novel first was published serially, Collins did an incredible job in keeping his details straight as he unfolded the mystery. It's hard enough to keep a story bounded from beginning to end anyway, but to do so without being able to revise the beginning to suit how the end evolves is simply staggering.

There are a fair number of interesting characters--Cuff and Bruff, the detective and the lawyer, the trio of cousins (Rachel, Godfrey, and Franklin), the Robinson Crusoe-reading steward Betteridge and his lady's maid daughter, and my favorite, Ezra Jennings, an opium addict who solves the mystery, at least 90% of it. I see a lot of Dickensian characterization particularly in the latter part of the book--for example, Octavius Guy (aka 'Gooseberry'), the little boy who works for Mr. Bruff, is afflicted with eyes that "projected so far, and they rolled about so loosely, that you wondered uneasily why they remained in their sockets."

Although in my last post on The Moonstone, I did include a couple of passages, I found the book remarkably thin when it came to passages that stirred my soul, challenged my intellect, or left me breathless with admiration. In other words, Collins told a good, interesting story but I didn't come away from reading it thinking that it had changed me in any way.

A good book, but not a great one. Now I need to get the movie on order!

Julie & Julia

I needed something to balance The Moonstone, something to read just before turning out the lights at night, something easy, frothy, fun, but still interesting. Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously has turned out to be just the ticket.

I've read loads of reviews of the book, both before and after seeing the movie, and have been anticipating all the less than great stuff others have written about. So far, so good. Julie Powell swears a lot, talks about sex a lot, rants and raves and has histrionics all over the floor, but she is funny, fallible, interesting, and has a few gems that redeem her and make the book more than simply notes on a weird project.

This is the first book I've read that refers to 9-11. I guess that's to be expected since I read so much pre-1900 literature. Most of the time when Julie writes about the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, it's on a purely personal level. Working in a government agency that is dealing with the aftermath of the tragedy, she recounts struggling to balance her frustration with her job and the raw emotion of the families she encounters. However, this little passage pulled away from her usual ego-centric response and was poetic and poignant and good writing:

When I was offered a permanent position back in the spring, those yellow trucks with the giant toothed scoops were still raking delicately through neat furrows of debris, searching for bits of people. Every once in a while, when you were downtown or even when you weren't, you'd still find a torn bit of paper skittering along the gutter. Pages from legal memos, work orders, inventory sheets--all of them mashed in this odd way, like the icing on a cake that's been wrapped in cellophane, and smudged with a strange pale powder, as if they'd been dusted for prints. You always knew just where they'd come from.

My other favorite bit, and I'm only just over half of the way through the book, is the last thing I read last night and is really what the book is all about. This is the closing to the chapter in which Julie deals with lobsters:

...sometimes you get a glimpse into a life that you never thought of before. There are hidden trap doors all over the place, and suddenly you see one, and the next thing you know you're flogging grateful businessmen or chopping lobsters in half, and the world's just so much bigger than you thought it was.

So that night I made my New Year's resolution, better late than never: To Get Over My Damned Self. If I was going to follow Julia down this rabbit hole, I was going to enjoy it, by God--exhaustion, crustacean murder, and all. Because not everybody gets a rabbit hole.

She's right--not everyone gets a rabbit hole, but worse than that is not enjoying the ride when you do.

Holiday Book Swap

One of the very cool things about playing in the blogosphere is the creative ways bloggers have developed to build community. I learn about something new almost every week. First, there was the whole awards thing. I was thrilled when I was given my first award and still feel honored everytime someone remembers me. Then, there was the Book Bloggers Appreciation Week, which I watched from the sidelines but was impressed by. The frequent giveaways also took me by surprise, not to mention the challenges and memes. Fun stuff. The latest is the Holiday Book Swap.

The holiday swap is a way for book bloggers to connect and celebrate the holiday spirit by sharing gifts. It’s done secret Santa style; all of the participants are randomly assigned a blogger to send a gift to, and these assignments are kept secret until the gift has been delivered. So no one knows who their gift is coming from!

Anyone who wants to join in has until the November 12 to do so. Just visit this website for details and FAQ.

I've really enjoyed getting to know other bloggers and blog readers and it's been gratifying and comforting to know there are so many people out there who share my taste in books, movies, music. It's also been a treat to discover so many authors/books that I've enjoyed but might have never heard about had I not taken the plunge into the blogging world.

Happy Holidays ... may the season begin!

The List...Sea of Heartbreak

My new favorite CD is The List, a twelve-song album in which Roseanne Cash sings some of the songs that her father, Johnny Cash, wrote down for her in 1973 to help her more fully appreciate her heritage. While he sprinkled a few of his own songs in the list, those on the CD are from other songwriters whose songs touched him and influenced him.

As a long-time fan of Johnny Cash, I was interested in getting some insight into what he considered milestones in American music. As a fan of Roseanne Cash, I have to agree with her husband who told her for years that she should record some of the List as her voice was particularly well-suited to these types of songs. Here's a good NPR story about The List.

My favorite song so far is Sea of Heartbreak .Roseanne sings this Hal David and Paul Hampton song with Bruce Springsteen.



Here is Don Gibson doing the song, which was #1 in 1961.



And Johnny doing it:



And Jimmy Buffet:



I like Roseanne's the best and Johnny's second best.